Hey all,
I haven’t had much of a chance to work on this game since my last update due to getting carried away on a side project, but I do have some big news that I’m eager to share (and which should be immediately obvious given the title :P). I’ve also done some work on character-specific abilities, bug fixing, and menu navigation, so read below the fold!
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s dev blog, so let me know via Facebook or Twitter.
Heya,
Among other things I’ve been working on since my last update, I’ve been working flat out on implementing game-changing powers, improving Samurai Showdown’s visuals to ensure players know exactly what is going on, and hunting down and fixing a very annoying profile bug. While the latest version of the game hasn’t been deployed to Itch.IO just yet, you can expect it to be on our page shortly.
For more on what exactly has changed and what’s next, read below the line!
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so let me know via Facebook or Twitter.
Hey all,
So I’ve recently had some free time due to work slowing down a little bit, and I haven’t entirely wasted it on replaying Mass Effect 3 (Vanguard is the best class and I dare you to disagree). Becuase of this, I’ve managed to complete several features which I’d been putting off in favour of tweaking the gameplay, and I think that they’ve gone a surprisingly long way towards making Samurai Showdown look like a proper game. I’m greatly looking forward to taking Samurai Showdown out in public again once PlayUp Perth events start up for 2017 as the dearth of events has been really bad for motivation and feedback, LMTY.
In any case, let’s talk about what’s been added, what’s been changed, and what’s being planned for the future!
No. They dream of fire and hate and irritating the hell out of me.
I suppose I should back up a bit. For the longest time, the AI of the player’s worshippers would only bounce back them and forth between their house and the nearest source of food depending on how hungry they were. I tried to expand the behaviours by including a stat called ‘energy level’ that would decrease over time and would trigger the return home behaviour if it dropped below a certain threshold. i also included a wandering behaviour that would trigger whenever other, more important behaviours weren’t active. Apparently this was a mistake as it completely blew the minds of the AI worshippers to the point where they’d either jam up forever or completely freak out depending on what minor changes to the code I had last made.
It took two days and a completely revamped AI system to fix this issue, but now the AI will wander around until they get hungry or tired and then walk to the nearest food source or their house, respectively. When they’re full and well rested they’ll begin to wander around again and the cycle starts over. I also included a repeating check to see if the AI has a house. If they have a house the AI does nothing, but if they don’t have a house they’ll try to get one from the game manager. If the AI still can’t find a house they’ll then start to wander around the map (unless they get hungry in which case they’ll go to the nearest source of food and then start to wander around).
As you can guess from the above paragraph, the behaviours themselves are pretty simple but we’re already starting to see them come together in fairly complex ways. Embedded below is a video of the current state of the game. It should be Fun to further improve on the AI.
Check out the AI in action here:
Otterspace Games 